Weymouth on Scimitar
An hour and half from home and I suddenly realised I hadn’t put my thermarest in the car………..bugger! Too late to turn back, this meant a rather uncomfortable night on the ground. I was camping overnight in Weymouth in order to meet the others at 7.30 with ropes off at 8 the following morning.
What concerned me most, given the time of the year, was the cold. A thermarest whilst being the most comfortable sleeping mat on the market with its honeycomb design inside, is also a fantastic insulator against the cold that comes up through the ground. Having spent more nights in my tent last year than my bed, my sleeping bag was a little knackered to say the least and not up to much these days, certainly not the frost that I was expecting given the forecast, so I had been relying on the thermarest to stop the cold coming up. Finally I decided to chuck all my diving gear out of the car and sleep in there. Despite having an estate car it’s only a small one, so I have to sleep on an angle if I want to stretch out. It is one of the few times I am glad I am so short! Laying my tent out in the back of the car for a bit of extra insulation to sleep on rather an in I at least managed to get some sleep before it got very cold round about four in the morning. The ice on the car windows had melted by six and that was when I was planning to get up anyway.
Meeting the others down by the harbour it was nice and quiet being a Sunday morning and we were soon loaded up and away. In the meantime the sun had come out and it promised to be a lovely day as we made our way across a very flat sea to the first dive site the St Dunstan. Having done this wreck a couple of weeks earlier I was interested to do it again as I felt I knew my way round it a bit. It turned out to be a fantastic dive because of the viz which was around 10-12m. I saw so much more than I had the time before and even rescued a crab that had got caught in some fishing line. The only down about the whole dive was that I messed up my camera settings. I thought I had set it up to take some more pics in Raw but realised at the end of the dive that all I had taken were Jpegs. The camera had defaulted back to the Jpeg setting. Not being used to taking Raw pics I hadn’t even caught on to the fact that it wasn’t taking long to save them onto the card. I was gutted. With such good visibility it had been absolutely ideal for taking some really good pictures. So although the pics seem reasonable I know they probably could have been even better taken in RAW with some tweaking in Photoshop.
The second dive was the James Fennel, which was on our way back towards Weymouth and near the shoreline. This was a steam trawler, which was very broken up; the boiler being the only part that I recognised. Having pootled around the wreckage a bit and taken some pics (this time making sure it was set to Raw!) I then decided to go and have a look around further away from the wreckage. This seemed a little more fruitful in terms of marine life and I found tompots and velvet swimming crabs and some lovely big snakelock anemones. There were also lots of sponges and sea squirts scattered around on the huge rocks. So a nice little dive especially if you think of it as a scenic rather than a wreck dive.
